In planning my first FMP application, I’ve come upon a need to be able to sequence through records of a related table from a tab on the application’s main layout.

Attached is an example of what I’m trying to accomplish. I’ve tried several things but just haven’t found the right combination.

I guess the simplest way to ask my question is: On the Alternate Access Method tab, how do I gain focus on the Item table so that the Next Item button will work?

I only have a couple of weeks of hands on experience with FMP 8, so I’m using most of the features for the first time and I know I missing somthing simple here.

Can anyone suggest what might work?

Thanks in advance.

WinTest3.fp7.ZIP

You might want to try and look at the Get NthRecord Funtion. It allows you to retrieve data from any related record. You can set a global field to show your data and use a script on the button to do something like this.

WinTest_revised.zip

Thanks very much for your solution. It does just what I needed. I have to admit I had no idea it would be that involved to be able to fetch/display Next Record and Previous Record. Using global fields wasn’t something I was looking at for this. In order for me to have a better conceptual grasp on this, is it correct to say that:

Portals in FMP gain access to a group of records – with the current group/contents held off somewhere in FMP (i.e., outside of the application’s defined tables)

Global fields act as a portal for a single specifed record, with the dynamic contents held in a defined place inside the application.

Or is there a better way of thinking of this?

This leads me to another question regarding my WinTest3 example:

Let’s say I want to display a dozen different records out of the item file, with the “needed record numbers” calculated through a variety of methods that result in a set of absolute record numbers like 2, 10, 21 and so forth. Should I set up twelve different named global fields to be able to work with the twelve item descriptions? – or would one global field with 12 repetitions be better?

Thanks again for your assistance.

Portals in FMP gain access to a group of records – with the current group/contents held off somewhere in FMP (i.e., outside of the application’s defined tables)

A portal is nothing more than a window to show the related records based off the relationship that you stated. So if there are 20 records related to the current record then the portal should show 20 records.

Global fields act as a portal for a single specifed record, with the dynamic contents held in a defined place inside the application.

Not really. A global field is a user / session specific field that can be accessed from different records and across different tables. It does not affect the current record because it stores the data globally.

Because you wanted to access a specific record of the related records, the example used the GetNthRecord () function. Based off the record number stored in the global field, the GetNthRecord () function looked up the ItemNumber and stored it into another global field gItemNum.

Then a new relationship was created basing it off of the gItemNumber. So the fields that you had onthere would show the related data of the Item Number that was in the gItemNum field.

I hope this clears things up a little.

I would strongly recommend that you read David Kachel's white paper for novices. It is an excellent write up.